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Bookworm: An Accidental Affair

'Affair' is a gritty, tasty, page-turner

You’ll get yours. Whatever comes around, goes around. Tit for tat and all that. Whatever you do comes back to haunt you. For every action, there’s an equal reaction. You always reap what you sow, and payback’s a… well, you know what it is.

When James Thicke beat down Johnny Bergs for sleeping with his wife, it seemed that Bergs got what he deserved. But in the new book An Accidental Affair by Eric Jerome Dickey, Thicke might pay with his life for the beating.

He absolutely lost his temper.

When the steamy video went viral, screenwriter Thicke went crazy. There it was, Bergs making real love to beautiful Regina Baptiste for the cameras. Baptiste was Thicke’s wife, and though every man wanted to sleep with her, Thicke was the only man who had that right.

Bergs had crossed a line. So when Thicke found Bergs that rainy night, he pounded Bergs’s handsome face into pulp.

That was Mistake Number One: Bergs was rumored to be the son of a gangster.

In order to escape the Bergs family and his feelings of anger for his wife, whom he trusted to do a love scene without actually doing a love scene, Thicke moved to a low-income apartment complex. It was a good place to hide from the Bergs, the law and his own thoughts.

Mistake Number Two: There were too many needful women at the complex, and Thicke smelled like money. It was hard to avoid them, even when he wanted to.

Then Baptiste started following Thicke, crying, begging. She claimed that the scene with Bergs was a mistake. She wasn’t herself. She never intended for it to happen. It was an accident.

Once upon a time, Thicke stole Baptiste from another man. She had been living with that Norwegian, Bobby Holland, but she didn’t love him and he was bad for her. Holland had gotten her hooked on cocaine, and Thicke knew that the powder would eventually be the death of her.

Which was Mistake Number Three: The death was likely to be Thicke’s …

Well, there we go. Dickey has, once again, made me stay awake until all hours of the night, losing sleep and reading.

Yes, this is one of those kinds of books.

An Accidental Affair starts out a little rough. It seemed, at first, that it was going to be another tiresome erotica novel … and then the story grabs you by the throat and slams you into Thicke’s world, where the only people who can be trusted are those who’ve signed confidentiality clauses – and even then, you’re never sure.

I loved the intrigue here. I loved the touches of twisted wit. Reading An Accidental Affair is, in fact, like chewing on ambrosia-coated sandpaper: it’s gritty, but oh-so-very tasty and if you need a copy of it for your own, you need to get to your library or bookstore now.